Web 2.0 and what it means

This term-Web 2.0- is a very ambiguous and nebulous term. No one exactly knows what it means. Wikipedia says that “The term "Web 2.0" describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.” , while It is more cynically explained as “You make all the content. They keep all the revenue.” on bash.

It has been hailed as the democratization of the web. Anyone anywhere can edit the web, and make their mark. You can post your own video on youtube, comment on any blog or article. If you have more to share, start your own blog, and air out your views to the world. It was because of this phenomenon, that Time magazine, named You as the person of the year in 2006. Soon, I’m told, Obama, will answer comments in his weekly webcast once he becomes the president. On our own Indian side, the people’s president used to check his website, and answer the questions and emails that he got.

But all this creates a false sense of mass participations, as it is currently pictured. The Web still is heavily one sided, with a small minority of users, creating the content, and the majority passively consuming it. This was studied in a project, where edits of Wikipedia were watched. They found that “50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who [are] contributing ... a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix ... or something like that."

What was more interesting was that for a certain article(chosen to be studied), most of the content was created by just a couple of people, and the other, just made minor changes here and there. Read more about it here.

I recently could see the terrible one-sidededness of the web, on this very blog. A friend had a problem with his laptop, and I helped him to solve it. While searching for the solution, I found that quite a few people, were facing the same problem, and there was no coherent and exhaustive solution available anywhere. I solved it, by trial and error, after looking at hints here and there.

So I decided to document the solution, and put it up, on my blog. That post was this one. Now this entry comes within the top 10, of a google search, using any of the keywords, which a user would use, while searching for a solution, to this particular problem. And many did search, and a lot of people did come to this page. If you look at the screen shot below, you’ll see that over 170 people have seen this entry, most of them coming from search engines.

On an average, 4 to 5 people come everyday, searching for a solution to this problem. But how many people have left a thank you, or a comment? Only 1. Is this bad manners or lethargy? I don’t know.

What it does show is that, even with the Web 2.0, the Internet is very much a one sided flow of information, and the discussion, one thinks of, is rather limited.

This post is a part of the November madness programme that I am following, where I attempt to post one entry on this blog, everyday for the last 3 weeks of November.